The present disclosure relates generally to computer systems and software, and more particularly to techniques for providing cloud storage services in an enterprise environment.
Data storage, both from an enterprise and from a consumer perspective, has progressed from locally stored storage systems for each computer system, to network attached storage which serves as centralized storage for a number of networked computer systems. These systems are typically owned and maintained by the end user, resulting in significant costs and complexity for end users to manage. In response, cloud-based storage services have been created which provide secure, elastic, reliable, and cost-effective storage solutions. With cloud-based storage services, the end user need only enroll in the service and the service provider manages the hardware and configuration, data security and integrity, etc. This enables users to change the amount of storage available cheaply and easily, by signing up for a different level of service. Once enrolled, authorized users and/or applications can access the data from any Internet-connected device.
Because the costs, maintenance, and configuration and data storage in a cloud-based storage service is offloaded to the service provider, the service provider needs to be able to quickly and dynamically add, remove, or repurpose computing resources available to them. Traditionally, this has led to significant costs at the data center level to staff, monitor, and reconfigure computing resources to accommodate demand.